What is it Like Working at Automattic?

Working at home is the American dream, right? You could attend a meeting in your pajamas right from the comfort of your own living room, or wake up and not commute to work, and sit in traffic for a thousand hours. If you landed a job with Automattic, you could make the American dream a reality for yourself.

How Automattic Works

In the article “Working With Us,” on Automattic’s website, it tells you how it is to work in the life style that is Automattic. The site shares that everyone works from their home or offices, and have employees all over the world. Because of such a wide a ray of employees and times zones, Automattic is active twenty-four seven.

According to the article, when you make it past the interview process, you and a team of your co-workers will do a project together. This gives you an idea if you are a good fit for the job, and if you like working with your co-workers. On the other side of the coin this also gives your co-workers some sense on whether you’re a good fit with the team.

Benefits

According to the infographic on the article “Why Do People Actually Quit Their Jobs?” Kate Taylor shows how many people quit their jobs because of inflexibility. The infographic shows the top five deal breakers being:

Your boss doesn’t trust you

Work expectation during off-time

Difficult co-workers

Boss blames you for mistakes

Work isn’t flexible

On the same article “Working With Us” on Automattic’s Website, they share their take on how a work environment should be. Automattic lists their benefits as:

Open vacation policy (no set number of days per year). We encourage our employees to take the time they need to take vacation, develop interests, and spend time with friends and family.

Health, dental, & vision insurance for US and Canadian employees, their spouses or domestic partners, and children.

401(k) plans and match for US employees, and RRSP matching plan for Canadian employees.

We cover all costs of company travel.

We happily provide or reimburse hardware and software you’ll need, as well as books or conferences that promote continued learning.

Positions

Automattic offers quite a few different positions that you could apply for!

VIP Wrangler: aka the developer. In this job you are expected to proved code-level support to the customer. You will build and shaped the products and software, and as they so lovingly put it, “Making Stuff Go.”

JavaScript Engineer: In this job they want you to help develop things for WordPress that are going to make the site more usable to everyone. You need a solid understanding of HTML5, CSS, PHP, Ruby, Python, jQuery, Backbone, and Underscore to lock this job in.

HR Engineer: If you landed this job you would be the person that helped build a better working environment for you co-workers. They state that their HR team’s goal is to, “ensure our company is the best place Automatticians have ever worked.”

Along with these jobs there are many more, and this list would be super long. This means many opportunities for you to jump on the bandwagon and become and “Automattician.”

How They Communicate

Since Automattic is and office-less company, you may be asking yourself how these people communicate with one another? Well the answer is simple! On Automattics site they state:

we’re spread out all over the world — California, Texas, New York, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Japan, Iceland, Bulgaria, Australia, and more. We track about 70% of our projects on P-2 Themed WordPress.com blogs, 25% in private chat rooms, and the rest on Skype.

Pros and Cons

You don’t want to run out right now and apply for a job at Automattic without weighing the pros and cons from working at home. Not that Automattics way of existing is wrong, but making sure that and office-less space is something you can handle.

There are many things you should consider before running off and joining the pajama-wearing legion of at home employees. Lets start with the pros, because its so much fun to start on a happy note! According to the article, some of the pros include:

You are free to do as you please

There is no commute

You can work in shorts and a T-shirt

No one looks over your shoulder

If you are married or have children at home this type of work situation could be especially convenient for you

Now, on the other side of the coin, Monster says that cons of working at home are:

In takes a lot of self-discipline to start work when you know you don’t have to be to the office by 8 a.m.

You are the only person around all day, so there is no outside pressure to be busy

There are no co-works to go to lunch with

There is no delineation between work and home

As you can see there is a lot to take into consideration when it comes to choosing a career. You should spend a careful amount of time weighing your options when it comes to this. Hopefully now you have a little window into what a job at Automattic would be like.

Welcome to the class site for the WordPress classes at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. All content is created by the students and instructors writing about WordPress, offering WordPress tips, techniques, and helpful information as part of their class assignments. Student discussions are held on ClarkWP Talk. Please see our About, Contributors, and Policies for more information.

Students Serving Up WordPress Tips and Techniques for Clark College Students and the World

Welcome to ClarkWP Student Site

Welcome to the class site for the WordPress classes at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. All content is created by the students and instructors writing about WordPress, offering WordPress tips, techniques, and helpful information as part of their class assignments. Student discussions are held on ClarkWP Talk. Please see our About, Contributors, and Policies for more information.

Welcome to the Clark College student-run WordPress site. This is a class project for the WordPress and related courses offering articles by the students on WordPress and web publishing news, tips, techniques, and commentary.

Many of the articles are graded class assignments, but many are self-assignments by the students.